Invisible Ink: 307 Forgotten Christmas

Some of the old imagery of Christmas, conjured in songs and stories and on cards, is best left behind

This week, let’s take a diversion into the lost pleasures of the yuletide season. John Grossman is the owner of one of the world’s largest collections of Victorian and Edwardian artifacts and ephemera, and wrote Christmas Curiosities: Odd, Dark, and Forgotten Christmas with the intention of reminding us about what we’ve forgotten.

Some of the old imagery of Christmas, conjured in songs and stories and on cards, is best left behind, especially some uncomfortable ethnic connotations.

Devils armed with whips and demons dragging off naughty children formed the basis of common yuletide stories in Northern Europe, while the Krampus, a horned creature in Austro-Bavarian Alpine folklore, was a monstrous green-tinted figure who punished misbehaving children.

Coal-eyed imps scampered about terrorising children in much pre-St Nicholas literature. The Jólakötturinn was an Icelandic cannibalistic Christmas cat, and while Germany had the most frightening collection of anti-Santas, France had Père Fouettard, or “Father Whipper”, the child-chopping mad butcher.

The modern Santa’s red and white outfit probably mimicked the vestments of the original St Nicholas, the Bishop of Myra in the fourth Century, but the American image that we adopted was cemented into place by a Coca-Cola illustrator who added the fat suit, white trims and big fluffy beard, basing the look on Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from St Nicholas” (which begins “Twas the Night Before Christmas”).

A number of Dickens’s Christmas stories have now vanished, including “A Christmas Tree” and the eerie “Haunted”, a magical tale about a seasonal gift passed on with tragic consequences. Many fine Christmas ghost tales, designed to be told around a fire, have been lost.

In these, trains are marooned in snowdrifts, cottages and castles become places of imprisonment for gathered guests, ghosts visit with warnings, and children rarely feature at all.

The young had Christmas shows to look forward to, but much has been trimmed from these, too. More popular than Peter Pan was Where The Rainbow Ends by Clifford Mills, which began at the Savoy Theatre in 1911 and ran for decades.

It climaxed with a jingoistic showdown between St George and sinister foreign forces, embodied in a great dragon.

While modern pantomimes have gaudy costumes, pop hits, and double-entendres, this Christmas, at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall, veteran Roy Hudd has unearthed forgotten music hall routines (including the one that involves the cast performing neatly meshing actions). Perhaps it’s time to revive more missing Christmas rituals.